Two Perspectives of the A.W.A.R.D. Show

Written by:
Joanna G. Harris
Share This:


The A.W.A.R.D. Show—Two Cities, Two Views

A.W.A.R.D._Show_1-11
Katie Faulker and Private Freeman in “Until We Know for Sure”

ODC Theater, San Francisco
Jan. 15, 2011

Katie Faulkner won $10,000 at the A.W.A.R.D. Show for her choreography of “Until We Know for Sure.” She and her dancing partner for the piece, Private Freeman, well deserve the honor. Faulkner’s work was truly distinguished by its imagination, artistry and performance, or as the judges’ standards maintained, for potential, originality and execution. Faulkner is the founder of the Little Seismic Dance Company.

“Until We Know for Sure,” a duet for Faulkner and Freeman, evolves through four short segments, each marked by a blackout wherein the dancers shift their position onstage and, to some extent, their relationship to one another. It is as if we are seeing short film clips over time. They start side by side, walking on their bottoms, knees bent, hands pushing. What follows in the next sections are subtle changes in their relationship, accomplished by unusual, but not acrobatic, lifts and falls, moments of stillness and subtle use of hand, head and even foot gestures. In the final scene, Freeman is carried on Faulkner’s lap as she moves as she did at the start. Things change. This is artistry: we the audience may not be able to define the narrative, but we experience and know it. The piece was set to antique Fado recordings. Bravos to Faulkner and Freeman!

The other offerings on the finalist program were less distinguished, albeit pleasant and charming. Pearl Marill had won the event on Thursday night (Jan. 13) with “Missed Connections,” a duet for her and Cason MacBride. The program notes tell us that the text “pulls raw, unedited text directly from the Missed Connection section of Craigslist.” The Internet thus enters the dance world full time. Marill and MacBride both speak the texts as they move through the various stages of flirtation, acquaintance, attraction, endearment and antagonism. In many ways it is the comic version of what Faulkner accomplished, though hers was a portrayal of a complex intimate relationship. Marill’s choreography involved a good deal of running around, jumping on one another and mugging, a routine that could be valuable in vaudeville or on a TV variety show. The piece, though not good choreography, is entertaining. Caution: dancers need voice training to speak onstage.

The third finalist, who won on Friday, Jan. 14, was a trio by Dominic Van Duong, performed by Van Duong with Joshua Lau and Michael Saenz from the company sjDance. There is no program acknowledgement of the accompanying score, but Van Duong seemed to take his cue from the rather dull music, building a dance of slow arm gestures and pleasant spatial patterns. The movement phrases proceeded smoothly without much effect in the gestures nor in the dancers’ attitudes. Except for some crashing falls to the knees and some gentle lifts, Van Duong’s piece, “Exurgency,” was pleasant but very bland. It was startling to see three dancers whose body builds were almost exactly alike.

Each of the runners-up won $1,000. The A.W.A.R.D. (Artists with Audiences Responding to Dance) Show was founded in 2005 by choreographer Neta Pulvermacher. It is administered by the Joyce Theater Foundation in New York and this year has been expanded to include Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Seattle. The Bay Area has also been graced with its attention this year. Audiences voted for their favorites each night. The series has given “emerging” artists an opportunity to be seen in the marvelous refurbished ODC Theater and audiences to see a new range of work. Thanks are due to ODC Artistic Director Brenda Way and Theater Director Rob Bailis.

Dance. Eats.Money.

A.W.A.R.D. Show, Joyce SoHo
New York, Nov. 17-20, 2010

Sugar Show
Sugar Space, Salt Lake City
Nov. 19-20, 2010 (preliminaries)
Dec. 4, 2010 (finals)

“Imagine ‘So You Think You Can Dance’ without the flashing lights, screaming fans and millions of TV viewers, and voilà: The A.W.A.R.D. (Artists With Audiences Responding to Dance) Show,” wrote Apollinaire Scherr in the Financial Times. From the first time I heard about the A.W.A.R.D. Show, I have been uneasy with the idea. A young choreographer whom I had mentored called me one afternoon and asked if I were free that evening. He had purchased tickets to something called the A.W.A.R.D. Show being held at the Joyce SoHo in New York and one person for whom he’d bought a ticket couldn’t attend. Not knowing what it was, I said I’d go. When I got there it was clear that I had been invited expressly to vote for his piece. This illustrates just one of the flaws I see in the concept of the A.W.A.R.D. Show and its Salt Lake City spin-off, Sugar Show.

First, anything that gets money into the pockets of dance makers so that they can create their art cannot be dismissed as a bad thing at the outset, right? Then, why does the notion of these shows leave me with such mixed feelings? Obviously the concept chafes against my latent socialistic principles of equitable distribution of the goods. But other means of funding artists such as grants and fellowships are not 100 percent impartial and unbiased. However I’ve sat on many choreographers’ panels for both foundations and government agencies, and I’ve always observed an almost neurotic need for them to be fair at every step of the processes. And although the audience of voters at the Sugar / A.W.A.R.D. Shows is given POEM, (Potential, Originality, Execution, Merit), as criteria, it’s hard to believe that most people will come to the show and not vote for either their friends or for those choreographers whose work is most aligned with their own aesthetics. Over the years I’ve been solicited to come and “vote for my piece” by more than one fretful choreographer.

But assuming that people are able to put their familial and artistic allegiances aside, there is another issue – does one’s immediate visceral response to work always point to work that is good? From my own experience I would have to say probably not. Often the better work is the work I didn’t get instantaneously; work that I had to go home and actually think about; debate with my friends; let it hit me days/weeks/months after. Work that entertains me right away can be superficially funny or poignant, but it can be just that – superficial. I admit that I can be incredibly shallow and sucked in by cheap sentiment. In another art form, “Latter Days,” a 2003 tearjerker movie about a relationship between a closeted Mormon missionary and his openly gay neighbor made me well up and reach for the tissues. Clearly it could win my vote in some indie film award-type show. But is this great, or even good, filmmaking? I don’t think so.

Last fall I attended the A.W.A.R.D. Show in New York with Lindsey Drury, who had competed with the Salt Lake City-originated improv group, GoGoVertigoat; they had been eliminated on a previous evening. We had our little pencils and were to help choose a $10,000 winner from among three very similar, well-executed pieces. It seemed so arbitrary that one piece got the big prize, the other two got a thousand dollars apiece, and the nine “losers” from the preliminary nights got zilch. The work that won, a piece by Helen Simoneau, was a finely crafted solo for the choreographer; I’ve seen other work by Helen so I know she has choreographic chops. But was this quiet, unassuming solo really worth 10 times more cash than the other two pieces? I can’t honestly find the justification. It would have been just as fair, and more honest, to draw her name from a fish bowl and admit that the show was the lottery that it is.

Paradoxically, in my opinion, one advantage the SLC Sugar Show has over the other A.W.A.R.D. Shows is that it bestows a lot less money to the “winning work.” But it also gives technical support toward mounting a performance of the piece. So the disparity between “winner” and “losers” isn’t so great and the “winner” definitely gets a show out of the deal.

Another complaint I have with the Artists With Audiences Responding to Dance Show concept is the basic disingenuousness that feedback is the rationale for its existence. All the advertisements and the preshow lecture stressed the value of the audience feedback ad nauseam. We were told how much our thoughts and opinions meant to the choreographers in the development of their work. Now, I curate a works-in-progress series in New York (DraftWork at Danspace Project), and there is a talkback session after work is shown there, so it is my turn to be a little hypocritical and admit that I think that this form of feedback is of little value to most choreographers. As a choreographer myself, I’ve found this to be true. (I think of DraftWork as an audience education activity.)

This was borne out by the panel of experts the night I attended the A.W.A.R.D. Show. As much as the moderator tried to get them to say the opposite, the four panelists were pretty much in agreement that there first needs to be trust built between a critic and an artist before the artist can accept feedback. The artist needs to know the critic’s prejudices and preferences. Getting indiscriminate comments (positive, negative, or neutral) from random strangers immediately after performing must be taken with a gargantuan grain of salt. This was most strongly voiced by panelist Kate Weare, A.W.A.R.D. Show winner in 2007. The value of performing work-in-progress before a public is simply “performing work-in-progress before a public”; a good artist can take the temperature of the room and feel if the piece is effective or not. This is the usefulness of a series like Mudson/Judson; there is no public feedback, just the act of dancing in front of an interested audience. But I can’t see how, when performing, knowing that you are being judged, and there is a large amount of cash at the end of that judgment, cannot muddy both one’s artistic intent and the point of view of those judging.

In a mini-manifesto Lindsey Drury warns against: “The problem with teaching artists to please./The problem with teaching audiences to be pleased./The problem with the tyranny of liking.”

A final flaw, but a significant one, is the potential for these kinds of competitions to have a negative impact on the fragile ecology of a dance community. In a field where there are far too few resources compared to the need, do we really want to institutionalize a Darwinist environment in which choreographers are pitted against choreographers in a gladiatorial fight to the finish? An environment where the audience is subtly encouraged to respond more like the fans at a Utah Jazz game than supporters of an art form? In our post post-show emails, Drury wrote to me, “If (the audience gets) what they want – and the A.W.A.R.D. Show seeks to do just that – dance will end up resembling a floral arrangement; it will be unobtrusive and frictionless.”

The late choreographer Arnie Zane once said, “Dance eats money.” So what to do with the thousands of dollars that organizers in several cities across the country have raised to support the work of (winning) choreographers? Surely I don’t think that that money should not go to deserving artists. Of course not. But in my world-view, I favor a more equitable sharing of funds. For example, in the New York show, could the allocation of the $12,000 have been $6,000 to the “winner” and $3,000 each to the other finalists? But this would still leave the “losers” with nothing—which Claudia La Rocco in the New York Times reminds us is the “ugly downside to this contest, especially given that dancers and choreographers are rarely adequately compensated for their labor…” Perhaps the Sugar Show model could be used and improved upon so that more than one “winning” piece could get full production and administrative support. Maybe we need to think of more and better paradigms. Dance provocateur Keith Hennessy posits: “Do we make our own celebrity judge events that mimic—however poorly—the televised spectacle with its star-making machinery, or do we queer the forms to privilege creation, community, collaboration, and long-term sustainability of the dance ecologies?”

One existing new model is SQUART – short for Spontaneous Queer Art. It takes place in the San Francisco Bay Area and was originally conceived by Laura Arrington out of the desire “to foster community and to create work without preciousness.” SQUART’s format is simple— people who have RSVPed show up at 6 p.m. and split into four teams; they are given a list of criteria or themes and two hours to make a piece. The four teams create new works from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m.; their process of creation is transparent to the audience, meaning the public is invited to come early and watch them compose their pieces. At 8 p.m. whatever has been produced is performed. There aren’t directors / choreographers / performers in delineated roles; the performers don’t even know who they’ll be working with until they get to the theater that night. A panel of judges then comments on the work. There’s a $200 prize for the winning team. According to the event website, “It’s usually incredible, creative, inspiring, fun, and always bizarre.” Admission at the door is typically $5 to $20, sliding scale. The idea of a competition is still present, but it’s the act of creation that is forefront. It happens several times a year so the wealth gets spread. But Laura admits that, “big problems are ones of resources. The Award Shows are built around heaping resources on a singular spot, and not just money, but (the idea of) ‘bests’ … work gets boring when everything is structured towards being the best… I’d imagine if SQUART had $10,000 attached to it, it would quickly turn into something that resembles the A.W.A.R.D. Show.”

What other examples can we imagine? I just feel in my gut that emulating “So You Think You Can Dance,” “America’s Best Dance Crew,” “Dance Your Ass Off,” etc., is not the healthiest path for our community to take.

Ishmael Houston-Jones
(Written for Issue 2 of the Salt Lake City journal loveDANCEmore)

The A.W.A.R.D. Show

ODC Theater, San Francisco,
January 15, 2011

 

Katie Faulkner won $10,000 at the AWARDS Show for her choreography of “Until We Know for Sure.” She, and her dancing partner for the piece, Private Freeman, well deserve the honor. Faulkner’s work was truly distinguished by its imagination, artistry and performance, or as the judges’ standards maintained, for potential, originality and execution. Faulkner is the founder of the Little Seismic Dance Company.

“Until We Know for Sure,” a duet for Faulkner and Freeman, evolves through four short segments, each marked by a blackout wherein the dancers shift their position on stage and, to some extent, their relationship to one another. It is as if we are seeing short film clips over time. They start side by side, walking on their bottoms, knees bent, hands pushing. What follows in following sections are subtle changes in their relationship, accomplished by unusual, but not acrobatic, lifts and falls, moments of stillness and subtle use of hand, head and even foot gestures. In the final scene, Freeman is carried on Faulkner’s lap as she moves as she did at the start. Things change. This is artistry: we the audience may not be able to define the narrative, but we experience and know it. The piece was set to antique Fado recordings. Bravos to Faulkner and Freeman!

The other offerings on the finalist program were less distinguished, albeit pleasant and charming. Pearl Marill had won Thursday night’s event with “Missed Connections,” a duet for her and Cason MacBride. The program notes tell us that the text “pulls raw, unedited text directly from the Missed Connection section of Craigslist.” The Internet thus enters the dance world full time. Marill and MacBride both speak the texts as they move through the various stages of flirtation, acquaintance, attraction, endearment and antagonism. In many ways it is the comic version of what Faulkner accomplished though hers was a portrayal of a move complex intimate relationship. Marill’s choreography involved a good deal of running around, jumping on one another and mugging, a routine that could be valuable in vaudeville or on a TV variety show. The piece, though not good choreography, is entertaining. Caution: dancers need voice training to speak onstage.

The third finalist, who won on Friday, Jan. 14, was a trio by Dominic Van Duong, performed by Mr. Van Duong with Joshua Lau and Michael Saenz from company sjDance. There is no program acknowledgement of the accompanying score, but Van Duong seemed to take his cue from the rather dull music, building a dance of slow arm gestures and pleasant spatial patterns. The movement phrases proceeded smoothly without much affect in the gestures nor in the dancersÕ attitudes. Except for some crashing falls to the knees and some gentle lifts, Van Duong’s piece, “Exurgency,” was pleasant but very bland. It was startling to see three dancers whose body builds were almost exactly alike.

Each of the runners-up won $1000. The A.W.A.R.D. (Artists with Audiences Responding to Dance) Show was founded in 2005 by choreographer Net Pulvermacher. It is administered by the Joyce Theater Foundation in New York City and this year has been expanded to include Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Seattle. The Bay Area has been graced with its attention this year. Audiences voted for their favorites each night. The series has given “emerging” artists an opportunity to be seen in the marvelous refurbished ODC Theater and audiences to see a new range of work. Thanks are due to ODC Artistic Director, Brenda Way, Theater Director and Rob Bailis.

 

“A Midsummer Night’s Dream” teased out the memory of a story from the brother of the friend who accompanied me...
The Wilma Theater in Philadelphia was sold-out for the opening night of BalletX’s Spring Series with a triple bill featuring...
Under a foggy blue moon, The Willis haunted the Academy of Music stage to the delight of many young balletomanes...
Search CultureVulture